Things have been looking a little rough in camp CAPCOM for a while now and although attempting to create an online competitive experience using the Resident Evil franchise may have sounded a little odd, it was a rich nugget of gaming worth exploring if only to break new ground. The inclusion of social-like features in their mobile games (e.g. Dead Rising) has reached its logical conclusion with Resident Evil Mercenaries VS. and players can now duke it out against each other (and zombies) in a online death-match like mode.

Sadly the brakes get thrown on immediately as this is Resident Evil and it wouldn't be a Resident Evil game without clunky controls. What serves as a great mechanic for inducing panic and a sense of frailty in the games only works to make combat painfully wooden online as you can only run while your weapons are holstered and standing in a firing stance only provides mobility through dodging. Aiming is stiff as well as your movement controls double-up as your aiming controls while a host of contextual buttons on the left side pop in and out of view. Control options do provide some tweaking, but this mostly amounts to button pattern variations no manual customization.

While not the prettiest of games, Mercenaries does manage to hit the visual cues that make Resident Evil so iconic, though limiting the playable character count to three (especially when four people play in each match) seems like an odd restriction to make. Online play was generally smooth, though the stop/start combat along with the insanely huge health pools made for awkward combat, especially as people continue to dodge in order to stay alive. Perhaps the best mode available was a single-player 'blue coin' hunt, though this does defeat the entire point of playing a Resident Evil game in the first place.

Resident Evil Mercenaries VS. is certainly playable, but the dissection of the gameplay and its reassembly in to a combat-focused title without changes to the game's combat mechanics has resulted in something entirely unpalatable. It's likely you already own an online FPS title already and if that's the case you can probably skip over this title for now.